In-store Pickup on Walmart’s iOS & Android
In-Store Pickup reduced wait times for Walmart’s most valuable shoppers by 8 minutes, and increased NPS by 35%
Service design helped launched a new feature to iOS, Android, and over 3,000 stores across the United States.
Role
UX Architecture & Service Designer
Timeline
3 months
Responsibilities
Usability audit, Ethnographic research
In-store usability study,
Service design methods, Product design
Project overview + Impact
Our mission was to make getting products in-store easier, and faster, for Walmart’s most valuable shoppers. How might we get mobile shoppers, associates, and their order, in the same place and time with no additional wait?
An empty pickup counter adds an average of 6 minutes to wait times for customers. To combat this I partnered with Walmart Labs, using service design to build a shared understanding with the team, ultimately reducing wait times by 66%, and growing NPS by 40%. With a market potential of $6 billion, and in-store revenues of $1 million, In-Store Pickup was a big opportunity for Walmart.
Order ready notification & checkin flow
Happy path encouraging users to check-in before they leave
Clickable prototype
Discovery research
Ethnographic research, shop-alongs, and a visioning workshop
We partnered with Answer Lab to get a baseline for how this feature was performing. We combined those findings with a heuristic we conducted internally. We aligned on near-term high-impact fixes, and a bucket for long-term enhancements to follow-up later with.
Design process
How we launched to over 1000 stores
We used those findings to plan our sprints for execution:
Simplify the Check In userflow, and content strategy.
Show insteaed of tell through animations, and product imagery.
Increase porminence of Homepage Activity Notification with a big fat CTA, it was getting lost.
Connect the Check In experience end-to-end within the app, including My Account.
Identify and fix use cases or error states that were missing from Beta.
Service blueprint as a visual artifact that shows & tells
Crafted a service blueprint with the team to understand the problem holistically centering shoppers, and mentored a junior designer to bring the blueprint to life in order to tape to our wall to align the team, and show executive driveby’s what we’ve been up to.
Current state analysis
To set the stage for a service design kick-off workshop with designers, product, engineering, and stakeholders from the business, I created a current state analysis of the Pickup experience for Android and iOS side by side. I took screenshots of the userflow, and we marked up the boards with ideas and notes.
During the workshop we co-created a service blueprint and used that to capture questions and concerns to guide decisions around strategy and priority.
Scaling pickup today to additional pickup variations
Walmart had numerous ways to pickup online orders in-store, from curbside to pickup towers. Customers were confused where to go when arriving to the store. We needed to help provide specific tailored instructions, visuals, and maps for each type.
I partnered with content strategy and product to map out the cases, and integrate into the native checkin experience. This included manipulating layered creative files.
Writers, art directors, and an external illustrator provided the plain text and layered visuals.
Convince shopper’s to checkin with illustrative animations
Our goal from the business was to convince shoppers to check in before heading to Walmart. I assisted with research to confirm that shopper mental models didn’t connect “Checking In” to leaving their house. Shopper’s thought of “Check in” like an airport kiosk, something you did after you arrived in-store. Additionally, they felt the tech was a bit invasive regarding data privacy.
We brainstormed bringing this to moment to life with a delightful animation to guide their behavior and calm any concerns. I partnered with an in-house designer to animate a GIF to show shoppers what Check In meant. She leveraged the previous illustration work, built the animation, and I integrated it into the Checkin screen.
Graceful loading transitions
Pilot shoppers complained the shopping experience felt clunky with awkward transitions and jumping loaders. Before launch we had the opportunity to knock off a prioritized backlog of Nice-to-Have enhancements, and managed to get this in.
Skeleton loaders helped checkin gracefully transition between states from skeleton to content, guiding the shopper’s focus intentionally to important sections. This paradigm could scale across the app beyond Instore Pickup.
Delayed order strategies
I worked with store operations and training to concept edge case strategies around delayed orders. These were backlogged by the business as potential enhancements.
Release & next steps
We were able to increase check in conversions, and decrease average wait time, which unlocked the .
This unlocked the feature to be scaled to fleet, although we weren’t able to meet their check-in conversion target, nor convince the business to abandon their Check-in idea due to stakeholders and prior investment, we did align on how to move forward.